Quotes

i. “I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence.” (Frederick Douglass)

ii. “To make a contented slave it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken the moral and mental vision and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.” (-ll-)

iii. “The part of life we really live is small. For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time. […] In guarding their fortune men are often closefisted, yet, when it comes to the matter of wasting time, in the case of the one thing in which it is right to be miserly, they show themselves most prodigal.” (Seneca the Younger, On the shortness of life)

iv. “It takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and — what will perhaps make you wonder more — it takes the whole of life to learn how to die.” (-ll-)

v. “those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear for the future have a life that is very brief and troubled […] They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.” (-ll-)

vi. “The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of.” (James Richardson)

vii. “To condemn your sin in another is hypocrisy. Not to condemn is to reserve your right to sin.” (-ll-)

viii. “Let me have my dreams but not what I dream of.” (-ll-)

ix. “The man who sticks to his plan will become what he used to want to be.” (-ll-)

x. “The new gets old much faster than the old gets older.” (-ll-)

xi. “Embarrassment is the greatest teacher, but since its lessons are exactly those we have tried hardest to conceal from ourselves, it may teach us, also, to perfect our self-deception.” (-ll-)

xii. “Bitterness is a greater failure than failure.” (-ll-)

xiii. “The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.” (W. H. Auden)

xiv. “All the things that happen and seem so important at the time, and yet you forget them, one after another.” (Thomas M. Disch)

xv. “Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.” (Madeleine L’Engle)

xvi. “A man who knows how little he knows is well, a man who knows how much he knows is sick.” (Witter Bynner)

About me/this blog

This blog is mainly a site where I keep track of and share some of the stuff I read and learn. Only a small subset of the posts on this blog deal with economics – I have diverse interests, and as the category cloud in the sidebar below illustrates this blog contains posts about all kinds of stuff: Mathematics, physics, statistics, geology, geography, health care and medicine, psychology, evolutionary biology, genetics, history, anthropology, archaeology, chess, …

You’re always welcome to ask questions in the comment section. New readers should be aware that the first comment someone leaves on this blog is always withheld automatically to limit spam and needs to be approved by me before it appears on the site; so your first question or comment may not appear immediately.

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Goodreads Quotes

"Happiness and its anticipation are […] proximate mechanisms that lead us to perform and repeat acts that in the environments of history, at least, would have led to greater reproductive success." (Richard D. Alexander)